


and all the flowers will bloom

by orfaeus (hazy_daisy)



Category: Wanderlust (RP)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Identity Issues, M/M, Multi, Music, Self-Destructive Tendencies, Tags to be added, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-23
Updated: 2020-05-23
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:07:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24333316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hazy_daisy/pseuds/orfaeus
Summary: orpheus grows up; learns to live, learns to love, learns that lute strings and heartstrings are alike in that both can be played and both can snap.
Relationships: Orpheus & Aradea Lyss
Kudos: 3





	and all the flowers will bloom

**Author's Note:**

> we laughed, we cried, mostly we cried. if you don't pledge your undying love to orpheus after this something's gone horribly wrong

Orpheus has no fond childhood memories of home. 

What he once considered home is now no home to him. He still has glimpses of that place; of ornate decorations and the laughter of little boys and a shock of blue hair. He remembers the way his mother used to sing to him and run her fingers through his hair. He remembers his oldest brother’s name. He remembers part of his younger brother’s. By the time he is twenty, he has forgotten everything about his youngest brother except for the fact that he exists.

When he first arrives in a little village in Astidal, he knows Pythios’s name. Can picture his face. His father’s expression is a clear memory. Soft-spoken Cassander is fresh in his mind, and when he cries that first night, he cries for lack of Achilles, for lack of his mother. 

He is taken in, that first night, but the village in the trees will never be a home to him. Everything else, he forgets. Orpheus has no fond childhood memories of home.

The people don’t know where he came from. Orpheus doesn’t know what to tell the other children when they ask who he is, where he came from. He knows that he’s a prince. Was a prince. He doesn’t know what he is. He doesn’t know who he is. Orpheus’s name is Orpheus Ermes Agnes. When he’s asked, he introduces himself as Orpheus.

Ideally, the other kids wouldn’t seem to mind. Instead, it becomes evident very quickly that one of these things is not like the rest; Orpheus has no name, has no family. He plays with the other children, but he’s not quite as hardy. He burns easier in the sun. 

He thinks, maybe, that if he were a dragon, like his father, like his youngest brother, that he’d be able to play for longer. He thinks that if he were a dragon, like his father, a lot of things would be different.

Orpheus is taken in by the village, thank the sages for small graces. He spends his youth passed from house to house, and the people take turns feeding him, housing him, clothing him. He spends the most time with a young couple, Elena and Tom—they have a young boy of their own, Martin, and he and Orpheus are fast friends. 

Orpheus, as much consciously as unconsciously, molds himself against Martin as the example of what a good child should be. He’s evidently made some mistake, somewhere along the line, and he runs his mind ragged going through every little bit of time that he can remember from when he was younger where he might have messed up, might have done something to deserve what he is old enough to recognize as exile from his home. It  _ can’t _ just be the fact that he can’t shift. It can’t. His mother loves him—loved him—and his father never seemed to dislike him. Why would they leave him, dispose of him, unless he just wasn’t good enough? 

Martin is a good child, obviously he must be, because his parents treasure him. Orpheus considers him his best friend. Martin is energetic, and so Orpheus plays with the other children whenever he can, runs wherever he goes. Martin is a happy child. Easily excited. Orpheus puts a smile on his face whenever possible.

It’s not enough. If Orpheus were to be taken in by anyone, adopted by any of the families in the village, it would be Martin’s family. Elena and Tom seem to like him, Martin calls Orpheus his friend, and they share a bed more often than not when Orpheus is staying with them. Orpheus dreams, sometimes, about the day when Elena will tell him that he’s welcome to stay, if he wants—that they’ve got room enough, food enough, that there’s no reason for Orpheus to go stay somewhere else for the night when he could just stay with them. The day never comes. Tom and Elena already have a son, and it  _ stings _ , when they bid him good-bye in the mornings. The implications are blatantly obvious—if they wanted him to stay, he would. But they don’t. Elena and Tom love their son, and they seem to like Orpheus enough, but they certainly don’t like him enough to consider taking him for more than a night at a time.

It hurts,  _ so much _ , so deep in his chest that he thinks he’s dying sometimes when he cries. He smiles as much as he can. Tries desperately, against everything, against the pain in his chest, against the fact that he’s likeable but not loveable, against his nature, which only seems to ruin him over and over again, to be happy, to be good, to be good, to be good. 

He’s ten. Then eleven. Orpheus doesn’t know when his birthday is—all he knows is that the celebrations were in the summer months, when the sun would be warm on his face, when Cassander would sit with the last of the flowers, when Achilles would beg to go swimming to alleviate the heat. 

He tells Martin as much. Not about his brothers, but that his birthday is in the summer. Martin, not for the first time, asks about Orpheus’s past. This time, it’s innocuous—how did you celebrate at home?

Orpheus chokes on his words. He doesn’t remember much, but his brothers were there. His mother was there. He tells Martin that it was nothing big, nothing grandiose. 

Martin asks about Orpheus’s past several times. He only wants to know—Orpheus has access to Martin’s entire life, because his entire life is the little village amongst the trees, and Orpheus’s enigmatic past is a mystery, something exciting. Orpheus knows he’s been exiled. Knows that those stories aren’t his anymore. Knows that the title, the family name, none of it is his. He doesn’t know how much he’s allowed to say. He keeps everything a secret. When he can’t bring himself to avoid the questions, he tells Martin that he’s forgotten. The excuse becomes more believable and less of a lie as time goes by. 

“You’re a summer child,” Rowan’s grandmother says, one day. She is one of Orpheus’s favorite people. He’s not entirely too close to Rowan, but he’s nice enough, and he’s one of Martin’s friends. Staying with Rowan and his grandmother is nice, and not entirely because of Rowan.

“You’re a summer child,” she says. “It shows, you know. You’re a bright, sunny thing, Orpheus. You’ve got sunlight inside of you.” 

Rowan’s grandmother is one of the oldest people in the village. She’s wise. Orpheus knows this much. He learns not to smile around her unless it’s genuine, because she’s the only one who can tell when he’s faking it. He earns himself a gentle slap on the wrist when he tries to smile at her without meaning it, and an, “Orpheus. Don't play games with me.”

She doesn’t love him, but Orpheus thinks she cares for him. It’s her that gives him a piece of sweet bread, on a hot summer night, and says, “Happy birthday, whenever it may be.” 

She is the only one he says goodbye to when he leaves.

Orpheus would happily stay with Rowan’s grandmother, but she’s already got one child to take care of, and Rowan’s fiery temper makes him hard to handle. It still hurts, leaving that house, because of the irrational thought that maybe, if she cared for him enough, she would take on the trouble of taking care of him as well.

Orpheus is a good child. He wouldn’t be trouble. He doesn’t blame the old woman. He could never begrudge her anything. She tells him to call her Grandmother; he knows that he is not truly family, that the name is more for convenience than anything, but he nearly cries for happiness all the same.

  
Rowan is a bit older than Orpheus, and prone to yelling, and he’s gotten into fights with Martin more than once. He’s gotten into fights with Orpheus, actually, but never directly. Orpheus is too scared of seeming like trouble to start fights. What he will do, though, is step in to defend his best friend, and he’s gotten punched for it on more than one occasion. Rowan always apologizes, afterward. 

Rowan actually seemed to hate Orpheus, for the first while that they knew each other. It didn’t last forever. Orpheus learns how to make himself likeable, how to push for friendship without pushing too far, and eventually he learns that getting Rowan’s friendship is more about earning his trust than anything else. Orpheus does this. They become friends.

Someone teaches Rowan to carve wood into little figurines, and when Orpheus stays at his house, he teaches Orpheus little things that he’s picked up. When Orpheus manages to carve something that crudely resembles a duck, enough to be recognized as such, he gives it to Rowan—he looks surprised at first, but takes it, and ducks his head away for some reason, which Orpheus thinks is funny considering the circumstances. 

Orpheus’s childhood is a lot of people, but the face to stand out amongst them all is Aeva. She is what he thinks love is, when he’s eleven, when he’s thirteen, when he’s fifteen. She’s perfect, after all. The jewel of the town. Or maybe that’s just how he remembers it, with years of his life spent staring after her, imagining her in the beautiful clothing he saw women wearing back at his home. What used to be his home.

She thinks his hair is pretty. She runs her fingers through it, sometimes, and says that she likes the color, that she wishes she had hair like his. 

Orpheus thinks that maybe one day he’ll marry her. They’ll start a family, and they’ll be at home, here in the village in the forest. He’ll be at home here. He’ll have a family. People who love him. 

Orpheus reads a lot of storybooks in his free time. It’s the only literature available to him, besides the books that Rowan’s grandmother has, and he isn’t allowed to read those. Either way, the storybooks have the same stories that he used to have when he was back home, and it’s a comfort. They’re not exactly the same—some of the names are changed, and some of the details are different, but when he reads the story of the maiden, trapped in a tower, he can hear the voice of his mother, remember her face when she used to read the same story aloud to him.

Orpheus learned to read on fairytales, if just because that was his favorite thing to read. Storybooks were the first places that he started to attach sounds to the marks on the page, and they are where he finds an escape now. An escape, and a connection back to his home. 

Back to his past, really. But he’s eleven and he hates to think of it as his past. He’s barely old enough to have anything but a future.

Aeva seems to him to be the princess, in his fairytales. She’s beautiful, and kind, and everything that the fair maidens in the books are, and he thinks that if she really tried, she’s beautiful and kind enough that the animals would come to her aid.

Orpheus wants nothing more than to equate himself with the knights in those stories. The princes. He knows who he is, and it hurts; it’s tearing him apart, so he focuses on the stories where the hero is a knight. A defender of justice. Someone good, and strong, and handsome, and loveable. He jumps to the defense of anyone that he can. He gets in fights for it. He doesn’t get scolded as much as the kids who start the fights; the kids who have parents who care if they get into fights.

He thinks that he and Aeva are a perfect match, if he can be the knight she deserves, the knight she would love. He strives for that. They play together, as children, and Aeva designates herself queen, and Martin is the dragon, and Orpheus is the valorous knight who must defeat him. Orpheus is stronger, now, more accustomed to the sun, and he and Martin roll gleefully in the dirt. Orpheus pins his friend to the earth and looks up to Aeva with a grin—she smiles at him, and knights him with a sword that is just a stick even though he’s already a knight in the game, and she lets him kiss the back of her hand and call her ‘my lady’, giggling all the while.

And then Martin pounces on him from behind, howling that the dragon has returned from the dead, and they’re laughing and tussling all over again. 

They don’t play that game too often, because the adults don’t like it when they get their clothes all dirty, and Orpheus doesn’t want to be the dragon—there’s far too much there that hurts to examine too closely—and Martin doesn’t want to all the time either. Sometimes, when they do play, Rowan joins in and decides he wants to be the king. Orpheus hit him with a stick-sword for that, once, because he certainly doesn’t want Rowan to be king if Aeva’s going to be queen. Aeva laughs and declares, “It’s a coup!” Martin joins Orpheus, and they dethrone the king together, and it devolves into laughter all the same.

It’s when he’s twelve that a bard passes through their village. They don’t get many passers-through, and all the children are immediately enamoured with him, if just for the mystique of someone new, someone they don’t know. He plays the lute. Orpheus runs out with Rowan to see the new person, and stops dead in his tracks when he sees the instrument.

The lutist notices. “It’s a pretty instrument, isn’t it?” he calls, beckoning Orpheus over through the group of children. Martin falls into step next to Orpheus as he unfreezes and walks closer.

Orpheus reaches out to touch, to feel, and the bard lets him. “My mother used to play the lute,” he says, softly, feeling something in his heart rip open. 

“Oh,” says the bard, and there’s obvious pity in his eyes. 

Rowan hates being pitied. Orpheus knows this because he told him; the first year that he came to the village, before Rowan had decided that he liked him, Rowan had demanded to know why he was there, where his family was. All Orpheus had managed to say was that he couldn’t be with his family anymore.

“Oh,” Rowan said, and his eyes betrayed nothing. After a moment, he said, “My parents are dead, too. That’s why Grandmother takes care of me.”

“I’m sorry,” Orpheus had said, and Rowan glared at him.

“Don’t do that. Don’t pity me. I get it enough from the adults. I hate it.”

Orpheus didn’t like being hated by Rowan. It was awful, not being liked; a failure. His only goal with Rowan was to be friends with him. “Alright.”

Rowan hates pity. Orpheus doesn’t mind it. Someone has to care to pity you. 

He thinks that the bard assumes that his mother is dead. It’s not as if it’s an assumption that hasn’t been made before. It’s easier to let people believe that than to explain that his parents just didn’t want him. 

“I could teach you a couple of things, if you wanted,” the bard offers, and Orpheus imagines that his eyes light up with delight. He nods as enthusiastically as he can. 

Later, when the other children have dispersed, the bard sits cross-legged in the grass with Orpheus and shows him how to play the lute—a few chords, how to strum, a simple melody.

“You’re a natural,” the bard says, grinning. Orpheus glows under the praise. 

“Are you really a bard?” Orpheus asks, trying one of the chords.“You travel everywhere and make a living off music?” The chord makes a sour sound and he frowns, forgets his question momentarily. The bard reaches over to shift one of his fingers, and when he strums again, it sounds very pretty. He smiles triumphantly.

The bard laughs. “That does sound a bit more glamorous than ‘homeless musician’, I suppose. Yes, is the answer.”

“What’s it like?”

The bard sits back, hands in the grass, and thinks, eyes shifting up to the dimming sky. “Freeing. You can have a lot of things, living a life like any other person, but you’ll never have the freedom of traveling wherever you want, living life from one moment to the next, never certain and never tied down.”

Orpheus listens with stars in his eyes. His aspirations shift, there; knighthood is not entirely forgotten, but everything in him yearns to be a bard, a musician. 

“My name is Orpheus,” he says, because it occurs to him that he hasn’t said it yet. “I want to be a bard.”

The bard laughs. “Nice to meet you. I’m Phoebus.”

Rowan appears, then, which is probably to be expected, because Orpheus is supposed to stay with him that night. “Dinner’s ready, Orpheus,” he says, and squints at Phoebus the way he squints at people he hasn’t decided if he likes yet. “Grandma says the bard can come too, but he’s got to behave himself.”

“I’ll be perfectly well-behaved,” Phoebus says, grinning. His grin promises mischief. Orpheus suddenly has half a mind to cause some trouble.

Rowan’s grandmother squints at Phoebus the same way that Rowan did, but they eat together and things go peacefully. Orpheus goes on and on about the music, until he realizes that he’s been rambling and people don’t like it when he rambles, so he shuts up. Rowan frowns when he stops.

“You know,” Rowan’s grandmother says, at the end of dinner, “there’s a lot of things in that old chest of mine. There was a lute in there, once. Would you like it, Orpheus?” 

“Yes,” Orpheus says, faster than he intends to, and then, because he’s a good child and has nothing but the utmost of respect for her, “Thank you, ma’am.”

Phoebus offers to stay another day, help Orpheus with the old lute, show him a few more things. Orpheus thrills at the prospect. The bard, apparently, sleeps in the outdoors more often than not, and doesn’t ask to stay the night. Orpheus is about to ask if he can sleep outside, too, but Rowan’s grandmother gives him a look that tells him that he’s absolutely not going to be allowed to sleep outside.

“I think I’m going to be a bard,” he tells Rowan that night.

“So you’ll leave.”

“Well, I’ll have to. I can’t travel all over if I stay here.”

Rowan goes silent. From what Orpheus can see of his expression, he’s thinking things over.

Orpheus spends the whole of the next day with Phoebus, practicing. The other children drift over, from time to time. Aeva appears, around mid-day, and sits with them for a little while. Orpheus shows her all the nicest chords he can produce, and she looks very impressed, and Orpheus glows in the attention. Martin stops by from time to time. Rowan’s the one who sticks around longest; although, he doesn’t really do anything, just sits up against a tree and carves something and listens.

He and Martin share a bed that night, as they usually do, as they do especially when they want to talk to each other late at night without Martin’s parents hearing. 

“I think I’m going to be a bard,” he tells Martin that night.

“So you’ll leave? And travel all over?”

Orpheus nods, smiling. He’s excited.

“That’s phenomenal,” Martin declares, because phenomenal is his favorite new word at that time. 

Before Phoebus leaves, he sketches out some diagrams so that Orpheus can study chords, and tells him that he can make up whatever chords he wants, make up whatever melody he wants. Orpheus nods determinedly. Phoebus ruffles his hair and sets on his way, singing the song that he’d taught Orpheus the day before.

Orpheus spends that day on his own, a few yards into the forest, practicing chords and singing what songs he can pick out. A few days later, when he’s staying with Ariadne, a young widow, he picks out a tune from what is becoming the recesses of his memory.

“Where’d you hear that?” she asks, and he looks up, startled.

“Oh,” he says, and decides to answer honestly. “It was a lullaby. That my mother used to sing.”

Ariadne looks at him, pity in her eyes, and says, “It’s beautiful. I’m sure she’d be proud.”

Orpheus pauses. “Thank you,” he says, softer than he means to, because he’s not entirely sure that that would be true, but maybe it would be. Ariadne leaves, and he goes back to coaxing the tune haltingly from the strings of the lute.

The lute becomes his pride and joy, and his claim to fame, were he to want fame. He learns songs to sing them for Aeva, and she listens delightedly when he writes a ballad for her, one about a princess and a knight. She laughs and thanks him and kisses his cheek. He is thirteen, and he blushes, and says, half-jokingly, “Of course. Anything for you, princess.”

Things seem better, with his music. It’s something beautiful that he can do, a skill he’s acquired. Rowan carves wood to calm down, to settle himself. Orpheus plays the lute to feel skilled, and worthy, like someone interesting and loveable. Like someone his mother could maybe be proud of. Over the years, he figures out the notes to all of the songs that his mother used to sing for him, and makes the melodies more and more complex, until they sound like what she used to play.

Martin seems gratified to have this information about Orpheus’s past, even if it’s just music. He asks more questions about his mother that Orpheus doesn’t answer. Martin, unlike most, doesn’t think that Orpheus’s parents are dead—he’s too close to him, he’s spent too much time to not pick up the little hints that Orpheus doesn’t mean to leave. It’s likely why he feels justified, pressing like this. That, and the fact that while every mention of his family tears more wounds into his heart, Orpheus doesn’t let it show. It’s not nice, watching people hurt. People aren’t so pretty when they cry, unless they’re Aeva, who could never be anything but lovely. Orpheus doesn’t allow himself negative emotions, around other people. It would only make him more troublesome, less likeable. No, he sticks to the smiles and avoids Martin’s questions as best he can. 

Things seem better, but it’s a pretty dressing on a wound that cuts to bone. It still hurts to remember his mother, to remember his past. He’s forgetting his youngest brother’s name. It scares him. It still hurts to leave every house, to know he’s more or less welcome but not truly wanted, liked but not loved. He smiles whenever he can, when he’s around other people. He doesn’t smile very often when he’s on his own. 

“You’re hurting, child,” says Rowan’s grandmother one night, when Rowan is asleep and she and Orpheus are sitting by the fire—she in her chair, Orpheus on the floor, knees hugged to his chest. He can’t sleep, for some reason; she sits up with him, sometimes, on those nights. 

Orpheus can’t lie to her. He could never lie to her. He turns his head away, settling his cheek on his knees.

“It’s alright to hurt,” she says, and it sounds almost reminiscent of the night in the very beginning, when she’d told him  _ Rowan is hurting too. Give him some time. He’ll come around. _

“But it doesn’t stop,” Orpheus says, words muttered against his legs. “I just hurt and hurt and it doesn’t stop.”

“That’s the nature of pain,” she says, and her voice carries no pity, just something that Orpheus attributes to wisdom. Rowan’s grandmother has never been one to solve problems with affection; she gives advice, and sometimes it isn’t what one wants to hear, but it’s what you need. “It hurts until it heals.”

“I don’t think it’s going to heal,” he says, soft, barely audible, choked by tears.

“Maybe it won’t. But you’re strong, boy. You’ll survive. You’ll be alright.”

Somehow, that’s more comforting than telling him that things will work themselves out in the end. It conflicts with Orpheus’s picturesque wish for his future, where things turn out perfect, where he gets a fairytale ending and lives happily ever after—but he trusts Rowan’s grandmother. He accepts her alteration of the story.


End file.
